Brewery Graphics

 

I've been working on some graphics for my brewery. The first brew system I owned that earned a name was the "Front Porch Brewery". So named because I always set it up on the front porch. It was all gravity fed so using the front steps was a natural fit and worked very well. With my new electric brew system however I thought something a bit more grand was needed. Certainly something better than the "Garage Brewery".  Backing out of the driveway one morning it occurred to me, "you know, Gabel Road is not a bad looking little lane". And so the Gabel Road Brewery was born.

Next up I designed a basic shield beer label. It's been sitting on my computer for months now and with a pretty good first version of the 1880 Whitbread Porter on tap I sat down today to mock up a label for it. Any resemblance to another Porter label is purely coincidental. Nothing very fancy about it, I just played around with various fonts until I found one close to the look I was after and flooded the background with a brown gradient.

Still in the fermenter but soon to be transferred to keg is my Dirty Bastard clone. Using my blank label template I chose a new font for the name. My photo editing software does not have a tartan pattern. So I made one.

I started with a green gradient background and rotated it 45 degrees then chose to "repeat" it a dozen or more times. I used the flood tool to fill the background of my template. Next I duplicated that background and mirrored it. I reduced the density of that mirrored image by 50% to get a tartan-like checkerboard but it was still all green. So I flooded the white lines with a rusty red color and added some blur effect to soften the edges and bingo! An acceptable tartan background.



Next up I plan to keg the Filthy Bastard within the next day or so and I will be brewing version 1.1 of the 1880 Whitbread Porter. I was going to leave that one alone since it turned out so well but I have decided to make a few tweaks after all. A blog update and Youtube video is forthcoming to reveal those changes.